WantChina Times 2014-10-27
Unregulated land reclamation has caused serious coastal erosion across the intertidal zones of the Yellow Sea and Bohai Sea, threatening flocks of migratory birds and local environmental conditions, not to mention local residents’ daily lives, Shangahi’s China Business News reports.
Thus far, an total area of about 2,000sq km has been reclaimed from the Bohai Sea over the past two decades and the area is still expanding.
Land reclamation projects have caused a 57% decrease in China’s coastal wetland areas.
The China Council for International Cooperation on Environment and Development predicted that the country’s land reclamation projects could cause 188 billion yuan (US$30.7 billion) in losses per year to the marine and coastal ecological sector, equivalent to 6% of the national gross output value of marine industries.
http://www.wantchinatimes.com/news-subclass-cnt.aspx?id=20141027000048&cid=1105
The situation in the Chinese part of the Yellow Sea is even worse than that suggested here: a paper by Murray et al. published last year in Frontiers in Ecology found a loss of 70% of tidal-flat area in the Chinese part of the Yellow Sea between the 1950s and 2000s, with an annual loss of 2.2% per annum during the same period. A separate paper by Yan et al (2015) published in Environmental Research Letters unsurprisingly found a major negative impact of reclamation, especially in the Chinese part of the Yellow Sea and the East China Sea, on species diversity and biomass of macrozoobenthos in coastal sea waters.